Making a loss on Bitcoin

So, my little experiment in bitcoin mining is going to end up making a loss. Seven months after purchase, a Butterfly Labs Bitforce 5GH/s Bitcoin miner arrived. With the explosion in ASIC based miners, the difficulty level of mining bitcoin is doing a hockey stick, and hence the return on investment is declining radically. If Butterfly Labs had shipped their devices anything like on schedule, it would have been easier to make a small profit. I suppose this is a stark confirmation of the common wisdom that the people who make money from a gold rush are those who make picks and shovels. I've ended up with a block of metal with more significance as a historical footnote than anything else. As the 9-month difficulty chart below from BitcoinWisdom shows, difficulty is rising at an exponential rate. Difficulty is a measure of how many hashes-per-second it will take to solve a bl...